Archive for the ‘Black October’ Category

No, not the Michael Douglas Secret Service movie. This is an underrated, unknown ’70s gem that you really have to see if you like devil-oriented scarefests. While the star, Christina Raines, is pretty much a “who is that?” actress, this movie is just packed with famous faces. Some were already legends: Martin Balsam, Jose Ferrer, John Carradine, Ava Gardner and Arthur Kennedy. Others were just starting out, so watch for young Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum, Jerry Orbach, a super-sleazy Michael Sarandon and, in my favourite moment, a very, very young Nana Visitor and Tom Berenger as newlyweds. Wait, I’m changing my favourite moment to that part with the young lesbian nutcase Beverly D’Angelo. She gets naked.

Plot: A model rents a new apartment in Brooklyn. Upstairs, there’s a blind priest who sits in the window all day and all night. The other neighbours are very, very strange, including the little old man with the cat, who is not what he seems at all. The priest is there for a reason: he’s guarding the gateway.

I love this movie, mostly because the book it’s based on is one of my favourite horror novels. Jeffrey Konvitz must have been more than pleased to see his story adapted so faithfully; I just wish The Guardian, his equally fantastic sequel novel (No, not the stupid Kevin Costner/Ashton Kutcher swimming movie), never made it to film. This stuff is as good as, or better than, The Exorcist and most other ’70s Satanica.

Warning, though: The Sentinel uses people with actual physical deformities in one sequence, and this caused a stir of accusations of exploitation. If you’re sensitive that that kind of thing, you should probably watch some Twilight. Also, the poster is a spoiler.

I did once. I paid money to see Van Helsing in the cinema. With a few of my kids, I recall, because it was marketed as a Universal-style fun horror action flick.

The machine-gun crossbow was cool. Everything else made me wish iPhones had been invented so I could annoy the people behind me by browsing Reddit during the movie.

Between Hugh Jackman’s stupid accent and Kate Beckinsale’s stupider accent and the weird attempt to create a medieval Q, this effort at launching a new action franchise failed harder than your BlackBerry yesterday when you wanted to tell your boss you were running late, and don’t start the meeting until you arrive.

Of course, you all know how stupid I am. I bought this on DVD the other day for two bucks, hoping it would improve with age, then got home and discovered it’s on Netflix Canada. And then I watched it again, and I am as think as you stupid I am.

This is the movie that makes Hugh Jackman say “How about watching Kate and Leopold instead?” when friends come over.

It begins with a secret Department of Defence mission to the moon, an undocumented effort to install spy cameras to guard against Soviet incursions. Three NASA astronauts take off in secret as part of Apollo 18, which officially never existed, and two of them descend to the lunar surface to carry out their mission while the third orbits, waiting. Their families don’t know they’re there. The public thinks the Apollo program is finished. Only a select few military and NASA specialists on the ground know three Americans are in space.

On Day 1, they set up their cameras and collect samples.

On Day 2, they find a footprint that isn’t one of their own. And then they find something else.

On Day 3, they wake up to find their flag missing. And they know they aren’t alone.

I was hoping to love this but expecting to be disappointed. The result was right in the middle. It’s a found footage flick, like Paranormal Activity or Cannibal Holocaust, but it works fine, because that format functions best in enclosed environments. And it makes sense that old footage of the mission would be revealed decades later, so you can buy into the premise. It even looks like ’70s stock. The actors, all familiar-looking macho guys whose names don’t matter, are convincing as trapped, scared heroes used to being able to deal with whatever’s out there … until whatever’s out there wakes them up by shaking their lander as they sleep.

You probably have to be a genre fan to like this. It has very little mainstream appeal and could be a challenging watch for popcorners. And I suspect I’ll have to watch it again in a year or two to remind myself of it. But it succeeded on the most important front: for a while, especially in the first half hour, I forgot it came from someone’s imagination.

The only flaw, to me, is the threat itself, but that’s a minor quibble. This is a decent little space thriller with some real chills and plenty of the kind of space conspiracy crap I like reading about, even if I can’t even begin to buy into it. A secret lost lunar mission? Come on. Everyone knows Steve Austin was the last man to walk on the moon.

I can’t even talk to you right now. I’m a mess. I just watched what is either one of the best, or one of the worst, movies of all time.

PLOT: Rubber is a movie about a guy named Robert who roams the American desert, using his telekinetic powers to explode the heads of rabbits, cops and motel maids. Sometimes he just watches TV; he likes workout shows and NASCAR, which makes sense, because he’s a tire. A tire. He seems to notice this halfway through the movie, after he has a shower and a swim and sees himself in the mirror, and realizes he’s a tire. A tire.

So I just watched a flick about a tire rolling through the desert, killing people. It’s also about how aware the people within it are that they are in a movie, with a unique opener and an ongoing meta-subplot involving the audience, a group of people randomly gathered in the desert to watch Robert’s travels through binoculars, or maybe they’re staring at a distant drive-in. It’s tough to tell. And then they have their turkey dinner.

It’s severely flawed, but at the same time works on a smarter level then most people would notice, so as I sit here now, an hour after watching it, I have to say it has carved itself a nifty niche and, sorry, rolled onto new road, and so I have to go ahead and recommend it.

So after I watched The Woman, I went back and watched Offspring, its sort-of-predecessor, and realized how poorly produced it actually is. Not that it’s a bad movie. But with the same writer, the same lead actress and the same themes, Lucky McKee brought Jack Ketchum’s concepts to life in The Woman far better than has ever happened before.

That’s what a good director does. Whether Wes Craven is a good director is up to you, I suppose, but one of my favourites of his is The People Under The Stairs. I saw it again this weekend because my kid wanted to watch something scary and saw Human Centipede on Netflix and said “Whoah, can I watch that,” and I said “Go play Lego for a while.” In the end, I let the little horror junkie watch People Under The Stairs with me, and hey, we had a blast.

I forgot how much goofy fun this movie is. It has its violent moments, and there are some bad words thrown around, and there’s just a tiny hint of something sexual, but for the most part, it’s a strange and surreal flick about an old house and the various long-held-captive zombie-like creatures who live in its walls and cellar … the people under the stairs. And we have, of course, Mommy and Daddy, the landlords, who are so over the top they make Flowers in the Attic look like The Brady Bunch.

PLOT: Fool, a ghetto kid whose family, like many others, is about to be evicted just as his mother is dying and needs an expensive operation, is convinced by Ving Rhames, who wears a dashiki, that they should steal a rare coin collection from their landlords. These folks live in a decaying old mansion in the middle of the ghetto, so Fool dresses up like a cub scout and tries to decoy the landlady so Ving and his partner can rob the house. But the landlords are onto them, and have a few traps set … traps that have been used for generations to bring people to the house and keep them there … sometimes for food. Meanwhile, a pretty girl named Alice lives upstairs and has never been outside, and a boy named Roach lives in the walls.

This is a gloriously stupid movie. It’s flawed, it’s faulty and it’s, pardon me, foolish. But it’s fun, and it’s the kind of horror flick you can show a kid without worrying that it’ll warp his mind, which is why Human Centipede won’t be played in our TV room anytime soon. It’s been more than a year and I’m still getting over that one. Craven, though, took a gruesome concept and made it human, creating a horror movie that the whole family can enjoy, as long as nobody has issues with watching a guy eat Ving Rhames’ lower intestine. “No, man, I’m far from okay.”

Well, sure, it’s Halloween. It was always going to be Halloween. The whole point of this month of horror DVD reviews was building up to this moment. I plan things out, people.

Maybe you take John Carpenter’s 1978 classic film for granted, because you’ve seen it so many times. Maybe you’re pretty young, and you saw it on DVD for the first time last year, and you said “This is just like every other slasher movie.” You’d be wrong.

When Halloween was released, it was part of a fairly new genre of films. It isn’t the first slasher movie, despite what a lot of people think. Black Christmas, the seminal Canadian film, has more of a claim to that title than Halloween. What Halloween did do, though, was define the next 30 years of horror movies, and define it well. Every horror movie made since owes a debt to John Carpenter.

Plot: Laurie has to babysit on Halloween night. Meanwhile, a killer named Michael Myers is stalking her. And that’s it. That’s all. It’s perfect in its minimalism. The later sequels would try to attach more reason, more explanation, to the story, but it wasn’t necessary. Halloween works because it is brutal and honest and frightening as hell.

I came to this movie in a weird way: I read the book first. Not that this is based on any real novel; someone smuggled me the knockoff paperback adaptation when I was about 11, and because it had murders and a couple of sex scenes, I thought I’d struck bloody gold. I didn’t see the movie for a few more years, when Betamax came out, and boy, was I hooked. There’s a clarity to Halloween that sets it above and beyond all the other slasher films that followed it, and that’s what makes it work.

The sequels are crap. I’ll just come out and say that. Ted, Tony and Doug at the Horror Etc. podcast just spent three episodes dissecting the Halloween series beautifully; I recommend you listen to those shows. I agree with them completely: some things should be left alone, and later attempts to graft the supernatural onto the Halloween series were a mistake.

Rob Zombie remade the original film a couple of years ago, and made a terrible, terrible sequel called H2 this year. I didn’t mind Zombie’s first movie, but it didn’t come close to the original film. If you haven’t seen them, go ahead and skip them all. Just watch the original.

I’ve spent the last month watching and reviewing movies from my DVD’s horror shelf. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and I hope you’ve found at least one movie you didn’t know about. But if you aren’t a horror movie fan, you should at least watch Halloween. Especially tonight.

Update: Simply Syndicated’s Movies You Should See podcast takes a look at Halloween in its latest episode. Great minds think alike, and so do ours. Here it is.

I thought I’d seen this movie, but as I watched it just now, I realize I hadn’t. I think I was mixing it up with Virus, that movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, which I know I saw, but can’t remember. So Ghost Ship has been on my shelf all this time. I suppose this makes my random-access horror movie reviewing system worthwhile, but honestly, there are a couple of dozen other films I’d rather talk to you about, like Don’t Go In The Basement. But here we are with Ghost Ship.

It opens very strangely, with 60s Desilu-type titles and a swoony, dreamy tune. We realize we’re at sea, and it’s 1960 or so, and this is a luxury liner. What follows is one of the most gruesome scenes I’ve seen in a mainstream horror film, and it’s very, very well orchestrated.

The rest of the film? Not so much. This is a Hollywood attempt at blockbuster horror, so it has B-level actors, lots of action and stunt work, gloomy cinematography and, true to its time, incessant nu-metal music stings to make sure you know this is supposed to be scary.

The plot: A salvage crew learns of a luxury liner adrift in the Bering Sea, and heads north to find her and claim her. Once aboard, strange things begin to happen, visions appear, and it becomes clear that there is something on this boat that doesn’t want them to leave.

Gabriel Byrne heads the cast, and that gave me hope. Karl Urban’s in it, too. But so are Julianna Margulies and Ron Eldard, a couple, who were also on ER together and here play exactly the same characters: the tough woman and her mouthy subservient wanna-be boyfriend. And they don’t do it well. Margulies, who I have never thought of as a strong actress, mumbles her stupid dialogue while staring straight ahead at whoever’s in the scene with her. It’s bad, bad acting. And Eldard, who looks like a surfer here, falls back on his “Yo hey, I’m a dude” routine, which worked well on the short-lived American version of Men Behaving Badly, but is tiresome everywhere else.

A lot of money was spent on Ghost Ship, and it’s a slick-looking flick. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough to make it anything more than a quick popcorner. It barely even qualifies as a horror movie, in my book.